Good SEO or just ineffective?

SEO is an industry seething with egotistical bull-shitters. I haven’t written a sentence that blunt, or so accurate, in quite a while.

A good, strong and moral man can admit his flaws, his failings and his weaknesses. Unfortunately egotism is somewhat blinkered to ones flaws. Perhaps that is the reason nobody has had the balls to judge an SEO practitioner positively on the recent atrophy of their efforts. I’m talking about Google updates, specifically Penguin (Panda wasn’t so incomprehensible), and their bizarre impact.

After long hard thought, self criticism, self doubt and many discussions with people whom I believed to be genuine experts in the SEO industry, and my peers, I believe I’m ready to draw a very important conclusion from within all this silence.

If you were not negatively affected by Google Penguin updates, you were simply an ineffective SEO. You were, and you most likely still are.

Following Penguin I felt the only honest thing for me to say in regards to the SEO climate was “I don’t know what the hell is going on”. Many an egotistical SEO came out with some bollocks about on-page keyword density, link profiles, etc. They were frankly bullshitting themselves as much as they were bullshitting those who listened.

We are now working within an industry besmudged with lunacy. SEO agencies who charged clients to build links, are now charging clients to remove the same links, a stupid pursuit in the first instance and arguably a fraud. In some respects to optimise is not to optimise at all, many of the old games still work, but it’s a dance with an unknown irrational devil.

If you were affected by Penguin have the balls and the integrity to admit it. Have the decency to admit there is absolutely no definitive way to approach effective SEO and you simply don’t know what you’re doing. To admit you don’t know, is to be an effective and truthful SEO expert.

None of us really do, genuinely, with this fickle lord we desperately try to serve.

Be proud of the impact the Google Penguin Update had on your campaigns. You were an effective practitioner of what can only be considered a hallucinatory art. We played by Googles rules, but Google changed the rules. Now we try to rediscover those new rules and battle with the sea of hypocrisy, self promotion and egotism which plagues our industry.